John Hillcoat on Lawless, Nick Cave and Triple Nine

Available this week on DVD and Blu-ray, the film Lawless stars Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman and Guy Pearce in a tale adapted from the 2008 Matt Bondurant book The Wettest County in the World about the real-life exploits of the author’s bootlegger grandfather and great-uncles in Prohibition-era West Virginia. Director John Hillcoat described the film to Underwire as a period piece that takes place at a liminal moment in history: ” [Lawless] is where the West ends and the gangster begins.”

When the Prohibition reaches full swing in the moonshine stills of Franklin County, the Bondurant brothers run into trouble when Chicago special agent Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce) arrives from Chicago and demands a cut of their illegal liquor business. While the book portrays Rakes as simply a corrupt deputy sheriff, the movie transforms him into a dangerous psychopath who uses Prohibition as a cover for his sadistic impulses.

The smug, self-righteous sociopathy of Rakes is a departure from the normally empathetic underdogs and outlaws in Hillcoat’s films, like Arthur Burns, the Irish outlaw psychopath from The Proposition. While Burns had meaningful family relationships to keep him grounded, Rakes maintains an icy distance from everyone around him. Even his wife is nothing more than “one of his suits,” says Hillcoat.

Both the screenplay and the soundtrack for Lawless were composed by writer and musician Nick Cave, a long-time collaborator and friend of Hillcoat whose previous work with him includes the Australian prison drama Ghost of the Civil Dead. The two live near each other in Brighton, England, and have become so close over the years that they are both godfathers to each other’s children.

“The script is the starting point and the music is the end point, and for that to be [created by] one person is extra special,” says Hillcoat, who often works with the same cast and crew on multiple projects. “I love working with ensemble groups of actors…. When we’re in these extreme locations doing this stuff, the cast becomes like a family. I think that’s kind of why we all do it.”

Hillcoat’s movies often center around those bonds of love and family being tested in extreme situations, something we see not only in the relationship between the Bondurant brothers in Lawless, but also in his other films like The Road, where a father must protect his son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and The Proposition, where a man is forced to choose which member of his family will live and which will die.

“I think [those extreme situations] bring out the best and the very worst in people,” said Hillcoat. “To me, it just reveals what we’re really about.” (Actor Jason Clarke, who plays one of the bootlegging Bondurant brothers, talks about Lawless in the video below.)

His next project, an urban crime drama titled Triple Nine, is scheduled to begin shooting in spring 2012. It revolves around a family of Jewish Russian mobsters, where the real power resides in the hands of a woman whose partner is imprisoned in a Russian gulag. Hillcoat describes it as a contemporary look at “where criminals are at right now, from the Jewish Russian mob to the cartels in the street.”